The Sudan Handbook

thE WaR in thE WEst 239

by eighteen months of conflict. Aware that this estimate did not take into

account violent deaths and that the war had begun before September

2003, others produced an extrapolated figure of around 400,000 conflict-

related casualties between February 2003 and April 2005. This oft-cited

figure is problematic, however, as levels of violence were not constant

during that period. The US Department of State estimated the number

of deaths between March 2003 and January 2005 at somewhere between

63,000 to 146,000. This data covers the period from April 2003 to

mid-2004 when most of the government’s army and janjawid attacks

took place By contrast, figures from the United Nations and the African

Union indicate that there were 370 violent deaths per month in 2006,

250 in 2007, and less than 150 in 2008.

The emergence of Darfur as an international cause célèbre owes less

to levels of mortality than to a growing global awareness of preventable

violence, particularly in Africa. The first year of counterinsurgency in

Darfur passed unnoticed. It was the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan

genocide in 2004 and the memory of international inaction in Rwanda

that triggered attention to the death toll in Darfur on the part of United

Nations officials, human rights activists and journalists. By analogy with

Rwanda, the killings in Darfur were labelled by some, particularly in the

United States, as a ‘genocide’. The US-based Darfur campaign embraced

the term and, along with it, the simplistic dichotomy between ‘Africans’

and ‘Arabs’; this was perpetuated in the language of the 2009 indictment

against Omar al-Bashir prepared by the Prosecutor of the International

Criminal Court (ICC). The prosecutor argued that the Sudan govern-

ment had sought to ‘end the history of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa

people’. The President’s ‘alibi was a counterinsurgency, his intent was

genocide’. The prosecutor also alleged that 5,000 people were still dying

each month in Darfur, and that genocide was still ongoing in the IDP

camps in Darfur.

This simplistic western discourse has now entered into the rhetoric

both of the rebels and of the increasingly politicized inhabitants of

displaced camps in Darfur and refugee camps in Chad. Interviewed in

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors July 2009, the SLA leader Abdel Wahid Mohamed al-Nur compared the

(www.riftvalley.net).